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And, yes, I DO take it personally

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got waterboarded ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-THREE TIMES IN ONE MONTH...?!?!? [UPDATE: Doing the math]

call me naive, but when i've considered the use of waterboarding and the horrific sense of imminent death by drowning it produces in the victim, i thought that applying that particular torture technique to someone a very few times would be the maximum terror "our guys" would permit any one individual to be exposed to, but

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-THREE...!!!

i knew we had crossed the line from interrogators to torturers... i didn't know we had further crossed the line into being monsters...

I've put this detail in a series of posts, but it really deserves a full post. According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.

The same OLC memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).

...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.

oh, my dear lord, have mercy on my country and my fellow countrymen... we've fallen into the blackest of holes and may never find our way back...

[UPDATE]

i just did the math... 183 times over the space of a 30-day month equates to over SIX TIMES A DAY...! i'm simply stunned... words cannot express the depth of my revulsion...

The president is wrong

Now we have a president who is perhaps doing something worse. Admitting that the last administration of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up a program of illegal and inhuman torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and in the so-called War on Terror that was launched by them in the wake of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, and offering up documentary evidence of the chain of command that set the country on this criminal course, President Obama now says that to move beyond this “dark and painful chapter in our history,” he will not seek or permit any prosecution of those who committed torture of captives.

“Nothing will be gained,” Obama said, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

I’m not that concerned about whether individual torturers in the CIA or the military get prosecuted. If the president had said he would not prosecute people who “thought” they were acting under proper authority and behaving legally, but then added that he would pursue those who authorized and ordered them to torture, I would not have fussed. But that is not what he said. The implication of his statement, and the fact that he has not, this far into his term, ordered his Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to investigate those who were responsible for the crime, given what he clearly knows about its authors, is the worst possible of travesties, and rises to the level of a war crime itself.

[...]

But the president is wrong. Darkness does not go away when the fog comes. It just gets darker.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Afghanistan earthquake

i was awakened around 2 a.m. by my bed shaking... i knew immediately it was an earthquake and remained awake for a few minutes before dropping back to sleep... around 4:30, i was awakened by another tremor and, again, stayed awake just long enough to satisfy myself it was over... i felt another one about three hours ago... i was reasonably sure that the epicenter wasn't too far away, so i'm not surprised to see this...

Villagers in eastern Afghanistan wailed in grief and scrambled through rubble on Friday to recover the bodies of dozens of people feared killed by a 5.5 magnitude earthquake.

Residents of the village of Mir Gadkhel said they thought dozens had been killed there. A Reuters cameraman also counted about 10 dead bodies in another nearby village, Sar Kot.

"Three of my family members were killed and seven are injured. I think about 40 people have died. Hundreds of houses have been destroyed," Gul Mohammad said in Mir Gadkhel, about 45 km (30 miles) west of the Afghan city of Jalalabad.

The U.S. Geological Survey said a 5.5 magnitude quake hit the area just before 2 a.m. on Friday (5:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday), followed by a 5.1 magnitude aftershock two hours later.

with all the misery that the afghan people face on a daily basis, they shouldn't have to deal with earthquakes too...

An Iranian scholar offers an enlightening lesson on Afghanistan

again, even though i am sitting here in the qall e-fatullah neighborhood of kabul getting ready to wind up my fourth visit to afghanistan in little more than a week, i certainly don't present myself as any authority on this country... i'm always on the lookout for a few words of wisdom that can help me understand the complexities of what i see in front of me each and every day...from the la times...

The people of Afghanistan should get some benefits from the presence of the foreign military. They should be enjoying a better life. After World War II, the American troops came to Europe and were liked, but they were not liked in Vietnam and Iraq, because [the people there] did not get anything good out of it.

from the moment i first stepped off the plane at the kabul airport a year ago march, i've been stunned at the living conditions i've witnessed, conditions that are staggeringly abhorrent nearly eight years after the u.s. invasion in late 2001... given the billions and billions of dollars that have been thrown at this country, to see people living in such desperate and deplorable circumstances defies all reason... i keep hoping obama will produce some kind of magic wand and make it all better, but it doesn't seem to be headed in that direction very fast...

take the time and read the entire article... it's clearly written by someone who has thought a great deal about the situation and is attempting to offer a bit of reasoned thinking, a commodity that seems to be in short supply...

At least ONE country believes in accountability and the rule of law - too bad it's not the U.S.

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on other points: They will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

Both Washington and Madrid appear determined not to allow the pending criminal investigation to get in the way of improved relations.

The six defendants - in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith - are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in "the war on terror." The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. "The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation," one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

But prosecutors will also ask that Judge Garzón, an internationally known figure due to his management of the case against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other high-profile cases, step aside. The case originally came to Garzón because he presided over efforts to bring terrorism charges against the five Spaniards previously held at Guantánamo. Spanish prosecutors consider it "awkward" for the same judge to have both the case against former U.S. officials based on the possible torture of the five Spaniards at Guantánamo and the case against those very same Spaniards. A source close to the prosecution also noted that there was concern about the reaction to the case in some parts of the U.S. media, where it had been viewed, incorrectly, as a sort of personal frolic of Judge Garzón. Instead, the prosecutors will ask Garzón to transfer the case to Judge Ismail Moreno, who is currently handling an investigation into kidnapping charges surrounding the CIA's use of facilities as a safe harbor in connection with the seizure of Khalid el-Masri, a German greengrocer who was seized and held at various CIA blacksites for about half a year as a result of mistaken identity. The decision on the transfer will be up to Judge Garzón in the first instance, and he is expected to make a quick ruling. If he denies the request, it may be appealed.

i'm happy to take accountability and the rule of law where and when i can get it, even if it's spain picking up the baton to indict officials from my country...

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Accountability for torture - will we EVER see it...?

i'm not wild about this decision, to say the least, but i might find it a little easier to swallow IF it was combined with an announcement that those responsible for authorizing the torture-based interrogation techniques were going to be held accountable... unfortunately, whatever hope i might have held for the restoration of accountability and the rule of law under obama is fast fading...

in case we've lost sight of just exactly WHO is accountable, here's the february 7, 2002, memorandum from george bush officially opening the door to the whole goddam mess...

Page 1

Page 2

and here's the december 2, 2002, memo from donald rumsfeld adding his authorization to those techniques... this is the memo that contains the infamous hand-written comment from the donald asking why, when HE stands for 8-10 hours a day, a detainee is limited to only 4 hours...

below are links to the complete list of the specific techniques that were authorized for use in iraq on september 14, 2003, by general ricardo sanchez, who has since tried to cover his ass, a la richard armitage (see previous post), by repudiating the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," AFTER perjuring himself before the senate armed services committee on may 19, 2004 (see my archive of previous posts here)...

The nightmare that is Dubai

i've now passed through dubai almost a dozen times over the past year and probably spent half that many nights in dubai hotels... in no way do i claim that makes me an expert on dubai... at best, i'm a casual, but still a reasonably intelligent and perceptive observer... however, i've found that the article that is very briefly excerpted below to be an accurate reflection of my own assessment...

[Dubai] is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing -- at last -- into history.

my own snarky description of dubai has always been "las vegas without a sense of humor," and then i heard jon stewart's description: "dubai is the bastard child of las vegas and saudi arabia"... i think jon and i are on the same wavelength...

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Armitage cops a plea on torture: "...had I known about it at the time..." [UPDATE]

ya know, i read shit like this and i just want to puke... armitage was high up in the government ranks, privy to damn near everything that was going on... besides that, he had the news media, both traditional and alternative, available to him just like the rest of us... when the torture issue became visible and, let's face it, it became visible early on in the bush administration, armitage would have been well placed to go find out the real skinny... now, he's out there telling us what he WOULD have done if ONLY he had KNOWN... how fucking disingenuous can this guy be and think that anybody is going to swallow it...?

A former senior US state department official has told Al Jazeera he hopes he would have had the courage to resign if he had known the CIA was waterboarding suspects while he was in office.

"I hope, had I known about it at the time I was serving, I would've had the courage to resign. But I don't know. It's in hindsight now," Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, told Al Jazeera's Faultlines programme.

He also said he considered the interrogation technique, where detainees are made to feel like they are drowning, to be torture, but said he did not believe CIA officials who used that method and other forms of harsh interrogation, should be prosecuted.

armitage is one of the craftiest snakes that's ever slithered through the higher echelons of the state department... he sees the writing on the wall... he's paying attention to what's happening in spain and he's going to be damned if he takes a fall... he's covering his own ass big time and, as he takes care to point out below, if he goes down, he's taking others down with him...

Armitage said members of US congress were as much to blame as Bush administration officials for failing to perform adequate oversight of US detentions, interrogations and "renditions" - the transfer of suspects to overseas prisons with different rules from the US.

"I don't think members of the senate particularly wanted to look into these things and they might have to look themselves in the mirror," he said.

"Where were they? They weren't doing their job, they were AWOL [absent without leave]."

what a positively disgusting, totally self-serving display of snake-hood...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Nouriel Roubini throws a little cold water on the premature celebration of the big banks "passing" the stress test

roubini points out a fact that's also occurred to me, namely, that of COURSE some of these godzilla banks are passing the stress test after the u.s. has thrown gazillions of dollars at them... shit... i'd be looking pretty good too if somebody showered me with money and then made a judgment call about the strength of my bank account...

According to preliminary results leaked to the New York Times, all 19 banks with assets above $100 billion that are subject to the Treasury’s ‘stress test’ are bound to pass the test. The official results are due by the end of April but the upbeat mood in the banking sector was already reflected in the 30% stock price rally in the run up to the Q1 earnings season. The major three commercial banks had already noted that they were profitable in the first two months of the year, and Wells Fargo announced that it expects to post a record net income of $3 billion when it reports results on April 22 (with combined net charge-offs of $3.3 billion for both Wells and Wachovia from $6.1 billion in the fourth quarter). Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs reported larger than expected Q1 earnings (ex December loss due to earnings calendar move) while at the same time raising fresh capital through a $5 billion stock sale in order to pay back the $10 billion in TARP money received last year.

Other commentators also point to the fact that many of these banks were among the main recipients of AIG bailout funds in previous months, e.g. Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion), Merrill Lynch ($6.8 billion), Bank of America ($5.2 billion), Citigroup ($2.3 billion) and Wachovia ($1.5 billion), according to New York Times data. The firms involved dismiss this factor as immaterial for Q1 earnings. Nevertheless, the GAO noted in a report at the end of March that Treasury should require that AIG seek additional concessions from employees and existing derivatives counterparties.

Bruce Fein: "The Bagram procedures are descendants of the Spanish Inquisition"

President Obama ratified the following charade to make "enemy combatant" determinations at Bagram, which can be the equivalent of life sentences. The initial judgment is made "in the field." It is reviewed within 75 days, and then at six-month intervals. The reviewing body is the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board, a panel of three commissioned officers. It examines "all relevant information reasonably available." The detainee is denied access to a personal representative or lawyer. He is denied access to the government's evidence. He is denied an opportunity to respond in person. He is limited to submitting a written statement without knowledge of either his accusers or the allegations that must be rebutted. After its sham hearing, the UECRB makes a recommendation by majority vote to the commanding general as to whether the detainee is an "enemy combatant."

The Bagram procedures are descendants of the Spanish Inquisition. The executive branch decrees that "enemy combatant" status justifies detention, enforces the decree through executive detentions, and decides whether its enforcement decisions are correct. That combination was what the Founding Fathers decried as the "very definition of tyranny" in The Federalist 47. In addition, the incriminating evidence and accusers are secret. And the judges are military persons the detainee is accused of hoping to kill, which probably compromises their putative impartiality.

The Obama DOJ - contradictions blatant, transparent, and extreme

The Obama DOJ is now squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions. Leave aside for the moment the issue of whether you believe that the U.S. Government should have the right to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to faraway prisons and hold them there indefinitely without charges or any rights at all. The Bush DOJ -- and now the Obama DOJ -- maintain the President does and should have that right, and that's an issue that has been extensively debated. It was, after all, one of the centerpieces of the Bush regime of radicalism, lawlessness and extremism.

[...]

I'm not searching for ways to criticize Obama. I wish I could be writing paeans celebrating the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law. But these actions -- these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney -- are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don't want to see it, or that you're so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you'll just believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good. If there was any unanimous progressive consensus over the last eight years, it was that the President does not have the power to kidnap people, ship them far away, and then imprison them indefinitely in a cage without due process. Has that progressive consensus changed as of January 20, 2009? I think we're going to find out.

it's very hard for me to square this with any hope i might have for a return to constitutional law, not when it's headed in the exact opposite direction...

Monday, April 13, 2009

With a nod to Atrios, I got nuthin'...

after a teasing half-day of warmth and sunshine on sunday, kabul is back to rain and mud puddles that could float small ships... in fact, half of the main drag heading west out of downtown is closed due to the depth of the water and there's a couple of taxis stranded in the middle of the road with water up past their floorboards...

Economist Hernando de Soto is the author of the "The Other Path" and "The Mystery of Capital." He has helped carry out property-reform programs for heads of state in about 20 countries.

[I]magine how I have felt watching my role models go to war over weapons of mass destruction that they never actually assessed, or now, watching them wage a losing war against derivatives -- which both Warren Buffet and George Soros have called "financial weapons of mass destruction" -- without locating or counting them either.

And, man, do those financial instruments need measuring: pooled, packaged and traded around the world, they are now the principal reason for today's massive credit contraction. The fear among financial institutions that potential borrowers and users of credit and capital could be burdened with so many nonperforming derivatives that they would be unable to repay their loans and protect their investments has plunged the global economy into a recession.

The Securities and Exchange Commission estimates that derivative paper is worth $596 trillion (10 times the value of total world production), while studies at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, conclude that it could be twice as much -- $1.2 quadrillion. And exactly how many of those derivatives are actually nonperforming and would have to be surgically removed to stop their toxicity from spreading and destroying trust among creditors and investors? Nobody knows that for sure either. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has set aside $1 trillion to assist in buying those toxic assets, but the SEC has guesstimated that there might be upward of $3 trillion worth.

[...]

If you want to get credit flowing again, you must restore trust in paper as soon as possible. And that means measuring the assets, recording them, finding and purging those that are toxic and preventing future debasement of the paper -- in essence, submitting it to property law just like all the other assets that we own and value.

Before we can get out of this recession, we need to concede that we just don't have the right information. At present, the world of derivatives is devoid of useful facts and a structure from which we can extract the meaning, knowledge and confidence required to end the credit crunch.

i have neither the background or the intelligence to comment intelligently on the arcane world of financial instruments, but i know solid wisdom when i read it...